by Hugh Howey
“So, are you planning on going through with it or not?” Jahns asked directly, her desperation evident.
“You said it yourself.” Holston shrugged. “Everyone does it. There must be some reason, right?”
He pretended not to care, to be disinterested in the why of the cleaning, but he had spent most of his life, the past three years especially, agonizing over the why. The question drove him nuts. And if his refusing to answer Jahns caused pain to those who had murdered his wife, he wouldn’t be upset.
Jahns rubbed her hands up and down the bars, anxious. “Can I tell them you’ll do it?” she asked.
“Or tell them I won’t. I don’t care. It sounds like either answer will mean the same to them.”
Jahns didn’t reply. Holston looked up at her, and the Mayor nodded.
“If you change your mind about the meal, let Deputy Marnes know. He’ll be at the desk all night, as is tradition—”
She didn’t need to say. Tears came to Holston’s eyes as he remembered that part of his former duties. He had manned that desk twelve years ago when Donna Parkins was put to cleaning, eight years ago when it was Jack Brent’s time. And he had spent a night clinging to the bars, lying on the floor, a complete wreck, three years ago when it was his wife’s turn.
Mayor Jahns turned to go.
“Sheriff,” Holston muttered before she got out of earshot.
“I’m sorry?” Jahns lingered on the other side of the bars, her gray, bushy brows hanging over her eyes.
“It’s Sheriff Marnes, now,” Holston reminded her. “Not Deputy.”
Jahns rapped a steel bar with her knuckles. “Eat something,” she said. “And I won’t insult you by suggesting you get some sleep.”
3
Three years earlier
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Allison said. “Honey, listen to this. You won’t believe this. Did you know there was more than one uprising?”
Holston looked up from the folder spread across his lap. Around him, scattered piles of paper covered the bed like a quilt—stacks and stacks of old files to sort through and new complaints to manage. Allison sat at her small desk at the foot of the bed. The two of them lived in one of the silo condos that had only been subdivided twice over the decades. It left room for luxuries like desks and wide non-bunk beds.
“And how would I have known about that?” he asked her. His wife turned and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Holston jabbed a folder at her computer screen. “All day long you’re unlocking secrets hundreds of years old and I’m supposed to know about them before you do?”
She stuck out her tongue. “It’s an expression. It’s my way of informing you. And why don’t you seem more curious? Did you hear what I just said?”
Holston shrugged. “I never would’ve assumed the one uprising we know about was the first—just that it was the most recent. If I’ve learned one thing from my job, it’s that no crime or crazy mob is ever all that original.” He picked up a folder by his knee. “You think this is the first water thief the silo’s known? Or that it’ll be the last?”
Allison’s chair squealed on the tile as she turned to face him. The monitor on the desk behind her blinked with the scraps and fragments of data she had pulled from the silo’s old servers, the remnants of information long ago deleted and overwritten countless times. Holston still didn’t understand how the retrieval process worked, or why someone smart enough to come up with it was dumb enough to love him, but he accepted both as truth.
“I’m piecing together a series of old reports,” she said. “If true, they mean something like our old uprising used to take place regularly. Like once every generation or so.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know about the old times,” Holston said. He rubbed his eyes and thought about all the paperwork he wasn’t getting done. “Maybe they didn’t have a system for cleaning the sensors, you know? I’ll bet back then, the view upstairs just got blurrier and blurrier until people went crazy, there’d be a revolt or something, and then they’d finally exile a few people to set things straight. Or maybe it was just natural population control, you know, before the lottery.”
Allison shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m starting to think—” She paused and glanced down at the spread of villainous paperwork around Holston. The sight of all the logged transgressions seemed to make her consider carefully what she was about to say. “I’m not passing judgment, not saying anyone was right or wrong or anything like that, I’m just suggesting that maybe the servers weren’t wiped out by the rebels during the uprising. Not like we’ve always been told, anyway.”
That got Holston’s attention. The mystery of the blank servers, the empty past of the silo’s ancestors, haunted them all. The erasure was nothing more than fuzzy legend. He closed the folder he was working on and set it aside. “What do you think caused it?” he asked his wife. “Do you think it was an accident? A fire or a power outage?” He listed the common theories.
Allison frowned. “No,” she said. She lowered her voice and looked around anxiously. “I think we wiped the hard drives. Our ancestors, I mean, not the rebels.” She turned and leaned toward the monitor, running her finger down a set of figures Holston couldn’t discern from the bed. “Twenty years,” she said. “Eighteen. Twenty-four.” Her finger slid down the screen with a squeak. “Twenty-eight. Sixteen. Fifteen.”
Holston plowed a path through the paperwork at his feet, putting the files back in stacks as he worked his way toward the desk. He sat on the foot of the bed, put a hand on his wife’s neck, and peered over her shoulder at the monitor.
“Are those dates?” he asked.
She nodded. “Just about every two decades, there’s a major revolt. This report catalogued them. It was one of the files deleted during the most recent uprising. Our uprising.”
She said “our” like either of them or any of their friends had been alive at the time. Holston knew what she meant, though. It was the uprising they had been raised in the shadow of, the one that seemed to have spawned them, the great conflict that hung over their childhoods, over their parents and grandparents. It was the uprising that filled whispers and occupied sideways glances.
“And what makes you think it was us, that it was the good guys who wiped the servers?”
She half turned and smiled grimly. “Who says we are the good guys?”
Holston stiffened. He pulled his hand away from Allison’s neck. “Don’t start. Don’t say anything that might—”
“I’m kidding,” she said, but it wasn’t a thing to kid about. It was two steps from traitorous, from cleaning. “My theory is this,” she said quickly, stressing the word theory. “There’s generational upheaval, right? I mean for over a hundred years, maybe longer. It’s like clockwork.” She pointed at the dates. “But then, during the great uprising—the only one we’ve known about till now—someone wiped the servers. Which, I’ll tell you, isn’t as easy as pressing a few buttons or starting a fire. There’s redundancies on top of redundancies. It would take a concerted effort, not an accident or any sort of rushed job or mere sabotage—”
“That doesn’t tell you who’s responsible,” Holston pointed out. His wife was a wizard with computers, no doubt, but sleuthing was not her bag, it was his.
“What tells me something,” she continued, “is that there were uprisings every generation for all this time, but there hasn’t been an uprising since.”
Allison bit her lip.
Holston sat up straight.
He glanced around the room and allowed this observation to sink in. He had a sudden vision of his wife yanking his sleuthing bag out of his hands and making off with it.
“So you’re saying—” He rubbed his chin and thought this through. “You’re saying that someone wiped out our history to stop us from repeating it?”
“Or worse.” She reached out and held his hand with both of hers. Her face had deepened from seriousness to something severe. “What if the reason for the revol
ts was right there on the hard drives? What if some part of our known history, or some data from the outside, or maybe the knowledge of whatever it was that made people move in here long, long ago—what if that information built up some kind of pressure that made people lose their marbles, or go stir crazy, or just want out?”
Holston shook his head. “I don’t want you thinking that way,” he cautioned her.
“I’m not saying they were right to go nuts,” she told him, back to being careful. “But from what I’ve pieced together so far, this is my theory.”
Holston gave the monitor an untrusting glance. “Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this,” he said. “I’m not even sure how you’re doing it, and maybe you shouldn’t be.”
“Honey, the information is there. If I don’t piece it together now, somebody else will at some point. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve already published a white paper on how to retrieve deleted and overwritten files. The rest of the IT department is spreading it around to help people who’ve unwittingly flushed something they needed.”
“I still think you should stop,” he said. “This isn’t the best idea. I can’t see any good coming of it—”
“No good coming from the truth? Knowing the truth is always good. And better that it’s us discovering it than someone else, right?”
Holston looked at his files. It’d been five years since the last person was sent to cleaning. The view outside was getting worse every day, and he could feel the pressure, as sheriff, to find someone. It was growing, like steam building up in the silo, ready to launch something out. People got nervous when they thought the time was near. It was like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies where the nerves finally made someone twitch, then lash out or say something regretful, and then they were in a cell, watching their last blurry sunset.
Holston sorted through the files all around him, wishing there was something in them. He would put a man to his death tomorrow to release that steam. His wife was poking some great, overly full balloon with a needle, and Holston wanted to get that air out of it before she poked too far.
4
Present Time
Holston sat on the lone steel bench in the airlock, his brain numb from lack of sleep and the surety of what lay before him. Nelson, the head of the cleaning lab, knelt in front of him and worked a leg of the white hazard suit over Holston’s foot.
“We’ve played around with the joint seals and added a second spray-on lining,” Nelson was saying. “It should give you more time out there than anyone has had before.”
This registered for Holston, and he remembered watching his wife go about her cleaning. The top floor of the silo with its great screens showing the outside world was usually empty for cleanings. The people inside couldn’t bear to watch what they’d done—or maybe they wanted to come up and enjoy a nice view without seeing what it took to get it. But Holston had watched; there was never any doubt that he would. He couldn’t see Allison’s face through her silver-masked helmet, couldn’t see her thin arms through the bulky suit as she scrubbed and scrubbed with her wool pads, but he knew her walk, her mannerisms. He had watched her finish the job, taking her time and doing it well, and then she had stepped back, looked in the camera one last time, waved at him, then turned to walk away. Like others before her, she had lumbered toward a nearby hill and had begun climbing up, trudging toward the dilapidated spires of that ancient and crumbling city just visible over the horizon. Holston hadn’t moved the entire time. Even as she fell on the side of the hill, clutching her helmet, writhing while the toxins first ate away the spray-on linings, then the suit, and finally his wife, he hadn’t moved.
“Other foot.”
Nelson slapped his ankle. Holston lifted his foot and allowed the tech to bunch the rest of the suit around his shins. Looking at his hands, at the black carbon undersuit he wore against his skin, Holston pictured it all dissolving off his body, sloughing away like flakes of dried grease from a generator’s pipe while the blood burst from his pores and pooled up in his lifeless suit.
“If you’ll grab the bar and stand—”
Nelson was walking him through a routine he’d seen twice before. Once with Jack Brent, who had been belligerent and hostile right up to the end, forcing him as sheriff to stand guard by the bench. And once with his wife, whom he had watched get ready through the airlock’s small porthole. Holston knew what to do from watching these others, but he still needed to be told. His thoughts were elsewhere. Reaching up, he grabbed the trapeze-like bar hanging above him and pulled himself upright. Nelson grabbed the sides of the suit and yanked them up to Holston’s waist. Two empty arms flapped to either side.
“Left hand here.”
Holston numbly obeyed. It was surreal to be on the other side of this—this mechanical death-walk of the condemned. Holston had often wondered why people complied, why they just went along. Even Jack Brent had done what he was told, as foul mouthed and verbally abusive as he’d been. Allison had done it quiet, just like this, Holston thought as he inserted one hand and then the other. The suit came up, and Holston thought maybe that people went along because they couldn’t believe it was happening. None of it was real enough to rebel against. The animal part of his mind wasn’t made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.
“Turn.”
He did.
There was a tug at the small of his back, and then a noisy zipping sound up to his neck. Another tug, another zip. Two layers of futility. The crunch of industrial Velcro over top. Pats and double-checks. Holston heard the hollow helmet slide off its shelf; he flexed his fingers inside the puffy gloves while Nelson checked over the dome’s innards.
“Let’s go over the procedure one more time.”
“It’s not necessary,” Holston said quietly.
Nelson glanced toward the airlock door leading back to the silo. Holston didn’t need to look to know someone was likely watching. “Bear with me,” Nelson said. “I have to do it by the book.”
Holston nodded, but he knew there wasn’t any “book.” Of all the mystic oral traditions passed through silo generations, none matched the cult-like intensity of the suit makers and the cleaning techs. Everyone gave them their space. The banned might do the physical cleaning, but these were the people who made it possible. These were the men and women who maintained the view to that wider world beyond the silo’s stifling confines.
Nelson placed the helmet on the bench. “You got your scrubbers here.” He patted the wool pads stuck to the front of the suit.
Holston pulled one off with a ripping sound, studied the whorls and curls of the rough material, then stuck it back on.
“Two squirts from the cleaning bottle before you scrub with the wool, then dry with this towel, then put the ablating films on last.” He patted the pockets in order, even though they were clearly labeled and numbered—upside down so Holston could read them—and color-coded.
Holston nodded and met the tech’s eyes for the first time. He was surprised to see fear there, fear he had learned well to notice in his profession. He almost asked Nelson what was wrong before it occurred to him: The man was worried all these instructions were for naught, that Holston would walk out—like everyone in the silo feared all prisoners would—and not do his duty. Not clean up for the people whose rules had killed him. Or was Nelson worried that the expensive and laborious gear he and his colleagues had built, using those secrets and techniques handed down from well before the uprising, would go away and rot to no purpose?
“You okay?” Nelson asked. “Anything too tight?”
Holston glanced around the airlock. My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.
He just shook his head.
“I’m ready,” he whispered.
It was the truth. Holston was oddly and truly very much ready to go.
And he remembered, suddenly, ho
w ready his wife had been as well.
5
Three Years Earlier
“I want to go out. I want to go out. Iwanttogoout.”
Holston arrived at the cafeteria in a sprint. His radio was still squawking, Deputy Marnes yelling something about Allison. Holston hadn’t even taken the time to respond, had just bolted up three flights of stairs toward the scene.
“What’s going on?” he asked. He swam through the crowd by the door and found his wife writhing on the cafeteria floor, held down by Connor and two other food staff employees. “Let her go!” He slapped their hands off his wife’s shins and nearly got one of her boots to his chin. “Settle down,” he said. He reached for her wrists, which were twisting this way and that to get out of the desperate grips of grown men. “Baby, what the hell is going on?”